Educational video games have the potential to be used as assessments of student understanding of complex concepts. However, the interpretation of the rich stream of complex data that results from the tracking of in-game actions is so difficult that it is one of the most serious blockades to the use of educational video games or simulations to…

Over the last decade, mobile communication has become increasingly available, affordable and accessible even to the poor and disadvantaged at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) in developing countries. This unprecedented connectivity at the BOP introduces not only an untapped group of media users for communication researchers, but also a new hope…

Engagement and motivation for participants in online learning have been studied extensively in business courses and in postsecondary courses. These studies have provided evidence of the difficulty for students to learn from and even complete online courses. Now that online learning is being promoted in high schools to cut costs and provide more…

The experience of discrimination is a complex phenomenon. At present, there are few studies that have captured the experience of discrimination on a predominately white university campus. This study was designed to investigate the association between perceived discrimination and self-reported health outcomes among university students in Southwest…

Alternative schools operate today as a hidden, parallel educational system, providing a separate and often unequal education to many at-risk students, with little to no accountability. The number of alternative schools, and enrollment in alternative schools, is increasing, due in part to excessive use of zero tolerance policies. Students of color,…

The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to compare the effects of gender on the perceptions that members of the boards of trustees of community colleges have of community college presidents. This study was guided by two research questions; the first one comparing the participants' perceptions of the male and female leader with the…

Over the last 50 years there has been a great deal of research focused on gender inequity in higher education in the U.S. These studies have been limited to individual or regional universities, or discussions on the possible causes of gender inequity in the area of higher education. This study examines gender inequity at doctoral-granting…

Recent advances in technology have led to an explosion in data collection over time rather than in a single snapshot. For example, microarray technology allows us to measure gene expression levels in different conditions over time. Such temporal data grants the opportunity for data miners to develop algorithms to address domain-related problems,…

Relatively recent federal education initiatives, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB; 2001), have focused on school accountability for student achievement including achievement of traditionally at-risk populations, such as students in special education, students from low-income or high poverty areas, and students who speak English as a new second…

Making decisions over multivariate time series is an important topic which has gained significant interest in the past decade. A time series is a sequence of data points which are measured and ordered over uniform time intervals. A multivariate time series is a set of multiple, related time series in a particular domain in which domain experts…

This study compared the responses of Native American youths ages 12-18 on the Behavior Assessment System for Children-2nd Edition (BASC-2) Self-Report-Adolescent (SRP-A) to a random sample of 200 from the BASC-2 normative sample. Two analyses were conducted: the first analysis was a 2x2 MANOVA (n = 162) comparing the two samples among composite…

The objective of my dissertation is to create a general approach to evaluating IS/IT projects using Real Option Analysis (ROA). This is an important problem because an IT Project Portfolio (ITPP) can represent hundreds of projects, millions of dollars of investment and hundreds of thousands of employee hours. Therefore, any advance in the…

Many U.S. universities are concerned with student retention. The current study surveyed 237 first time college students at a Midwestern university to determine the extent to which social-cognitive factors, such as high school GPA, ACT scores, first semester college GPA, college self-efficacy and perceptions of mentorship support influence…

Abstract Preschoolers' cognitive abilities were assessed each year as part of the Head Start Program requirements. The Head Start PK-4 Center evaluated preschoolers' cognition by administering the Learning Accomplishment Profile-Diagnostic (LAP-D), as a pretest and posttest measure. The LAP-D study used archival data collected from the 2009-2010…

Relationship quality has been determined to be a positive factor in the treatment of depression (Brown, 2000; Fagan, 2009). Although the importance of marriage has been broadly studied, little research has investigated correlations among relationship quality, depressive moods, and attachment styles. Although the prevalence of depressive moods has…